Richard and Judy Bookclub - 3 Bestsellers in 1: The American Boy, The Savage Garden, The Righteous Men. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ looked up at me. “I am glad the funeral is over. They always make me hippish. No one came, did they, no one but that American gentleman. You would not think it now but in his life Henry Frant had so many people proud to call him friend.”

      “The American gentleman?”

      “Mr Noak. He knew Mr Frant, it appears, and Mr Rush the American Minister introduced him to Papa and me a few weeks ago.”

      “I have met him, I believe. Mr Noak, that is to say.”

      She frowned. “When?”

      “He was at Russell-square once, just after his arrival from America. I saw him later, too, in Albemarle-street on the night Mr Wavenhoe died.”

      “But why should he come to the funeral? They do not appear to have been intimate friends, and Mr Frant’s crimes have turned his other friends into strangers.”

      “I do not know.” I looked into her face. “Can you not ask him yourself?”

      She shook her head. “I scarcely know him. We were introduced, but he has no conversation. Anyway, why should he wish to waste his time talking nonsense to a chit of a girl?”

      I made no reply, for none was needed, or not in words. The question hung in the air between us and she blushed. Our eyes met and we smiled at each other. Flora was never beautiful but when she smiled it made your heart leap.

      “Poor dear Sophie – Mrs Frant,” she said suddenly, perhaps eager to steer the conversation elsewhere. “She has nothing, you know, nothing left at all. Mr Frant even took the rest of her jewels. She had given him most of them already but on the day he went away he broke into a drawer of her dressing table and took what was left – the ones that were especially dear to her, that she hoped to save from the wreckage.”

      “The jewels were not found?”

      “No – it is presumed the murderer took them. Still, Sophie is not without friends, Mr Shield – not while I am here. She is as dear to me as an elder sister. My home shall be hers for as long as she needs it.”

      There were running footsteps on the stairs. Miss Carswall darted a glance at me, as if to assess the effect of her edifying sentiments, and turned aside to thread a needle by the light of the candle on her worktable.

      Charlie burst into the room, instantly slowing to the sedate, sober walk of one who has buried his father on that day. He wore deepest mourning but at unguarded moments his face gave the lie to his appearance of sorrow. I believed him deeply shocked by Mr Frant’s murder – how could he not be? – but I do not think he ever grieved for his father. He sat down by the fire. Miss Carswall took up a piece of embroidery. I opened my copy of Boethius’s De Consolatione.

      Occasionally a page rustled or the hand with the needle would move, but I do not think any of us did much work. It had been very cold that day, and I was still chilled to the bone. The gloom of the occasion afflicted us all in our different ways. Mr Frant’s funeral had been at St George the Martyr’s near Russell-square, and now his body was interred in the burying ground north of the Foundling Hospital. Somewhere above our heads lay Mrs Frant, attended by Mrs Kerridge. The widow had insisted on attending her husband’s funeral, which had brought a recurrence of the fever.

      It had been at Mrs Frant’s request that Charlie had been withdrawn from school for the rest of term, and that I had been hired to provide him with tuition and masculine company. According to Miss Carswall in one of her moments of indiscretion, Mrs Frant had worked herself into such a passion when Carswall initially opposed this plan that the doctors had feared for her life.

      Now the three of us sat in silence, pretending to be usefully occupied but in fact lost in our thoughts and waiting for the footman to bring the tea-tray. But my thirst was destined to remain unquenched, for when the man appeared, he desired me to wait on Mr Carswall.

      I went downstairs. The house was east of Cavendish-square, smaller in size and less fashionable in location than I had expected from Mr Carswall’s reputation for wealth. I found him in the back parlour on the floor below. Cigar in hand, he was sitting in an armchair before a large fire.

      “Shield, shut the door quickly, will you? It’s damned cold. Funerals always give me a chill. Stand there, man, stand in the light where I can see you.” He looked me up and down for a moment. “Charlie tells me you was a soldier. One of the nation’s heroes at Waterloo.”

      “I was there, sir, certainly.”

      He brayed with laughter, opening and then snapping shut his mouth as though catching a fly. “I could never see the purpose of lining up to be killed, myself. Still, I allow that it is valuable for the country if some of its young men think otherwise.” He took up a glass from a table at his elbow and sipped. “They tell me you saw Harry Frant dead.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Lying where he fell, was he? Wellington-terrace, ha! That was an unlucky speculation if you like. And all to end in a dark and gloomy cellar.”

      “The cellar was open to the sky, sir. The walls of the houses were not more than a few feet above the ground. Besides, though I saw where he had been killed, by the time I reached the place he had been moved. He lay in a shed nearby.”

      “Oh.” Carswall cleared the phlegm from his throat with a great rumble. “They never told me that. I understand the body had been much mutilated.”

      “That is correct.”

      “How? Spit it out, man. You need not mince your words. I may not have been a soldier but I am not lily-livered.”

      “The public journals said he had been attacked with a hammer.”

      “Very true. One was found in a hedgerow. There was blood on it, they said, and hairs. In your opinion, having seen the injuries, could that have been the instrument used?”

      “Very possibly, sir. Mr Frant had been much beaten about the head. Indeed, one eye had been quite put out.”

      “But you believe it was he?”

      “I could not be sure. The hair, the height, the clothes – even the hands: everything supported that conclusion.”

      “Yet the face was unrecognisable. That is the long and the short of it, is it not?”

      “If it was not he, there was certainly a general similarity in appearance. The cast of features, the –”

      “Granted,” Carswall interrupted. “But what of the hands?”

      “Mr Frant’s ring was on his right hand. The top joints of the forefinger on the other hand were missing.”

      “They were a gentleman’s hands?”

      I shrugged. “It is hard to say. They too had been much marked. Nor did I have either the opportunity or inclination to examine them closely. Besides, the light was not good.”

      Carswall consulted a watch he took from his waistcoat pocket. He sighed as though he did not like what it told him. For a moment, he stared into the depths of the fire. His cravat was loosened, his breeches were unbuttoned at the waist and the knee. His coat was crumpled and stained, his hair in disarray. But his mind was capable of such vigour, СКАЧАТЬ